 Live from Santa Clara in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation and Pivotal. Oh my gosh, one of the fun t-shirts here at the Cloud Foundry Summit. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, John Troyer. We've had a day of some really good interviews, really like geeking out, digging into this, you know, this hybrid, multi-cloud world, John. Something that feels to be coming into focus a little bit more. I had a bunch of questions coming in and many of them, at least, I have some answers as to where they're going. What's your take on the Cloud Foundry Summit? Yeah, my first Cloud Foundry Summit, I thought was super interesting. We got to talk to a couple of users, which is always really interesting and also some folks from the foundation. You know, it was insightful actually. I think, I talked to a few vendors here and they said, well, how's the crowd? I said, not big, but the people here here are big. Right, in terms of, you know, there weren't 20,000 people here, there were 1,700. But the companies that are involved are serious about Cloud Foundry. They're all in, they're building apps. They're not, and they're not building one or two apps. They're building thousands of apps on, you know, on Cloud Foundry and moving their whole enterprise over. So that was kind of super enlightening to me. Yeah, I mean, John, we know the story here. We've talked at a number of events about this. You know, when you've got big financial companies, you know, insurance companies, people in healthcare, if they don't become more agile, they will be uberized. We have to have a different term, right? Uber's in the news for all the bad reasons now. So Netflix was the old term, but that digital disruption by startups. So, you know, right, when you hear companies, oh, we're a 75-year-old company. We're a 100-year-old company. We're becoming a software company and therefore we're going to take our thousands of apps and some we're writing, you know, we always have the new things we're writing and then we'll move some along. So that application, really spectrum of the new stuff and then pulling along the old one with a platform like Cloud Foundry being that bridge to the future, if you will. Right, right. And we aren't talking about a small team chatting on Slack. We're talking about, you know, in one organization, thousands of developers coordinating on this platform. Yeah, absolutely. You talked to Express Scripts. I think they said they're hiring about 1,000 engineers, you know, in like a little more than a year. So, you know, right, big companies, a lot of things to move when we're talking, you know, Liberty Mutual is like, oh, we want 75% of our IT staff to be writing code and today they're less than 50%. So if you're sitting in that other 50%, you know, the writing is on the wall that you need to, you know, move in that direction or maybe we're not the right organization for you. And I'm curious your take about, you know, that retraining of staff and, you know, we know we have a shortage, some of the skill sets, how do they learn, how do they get, you know, is it certifications, is it training? What have you seen? Well, they did just announce the new sort of, the Cloud Foundry Certification Program here today. And so that was a, I think that's an interesting component, you know, that's needed for support for this. But really the Cloud Foundry supports all sorts of technologies. And I think you see it in the, both the contributors here and kind of in the technology. So it's a polyglot world. I see a lot of people, the crowd used to be known as sysadmins are indeed doing more programming, doing more automation. And so I think it's all of a course. I think, you know, look, it's clear. In five or 10 years, the profile of people in IT is going to look a lot different. And this is one of the leading edges of it. Yeah, coming into the show when we talked about it on the intro, that drumbeat of Kubernetes, really gaining the, you know, hearts and minds of developers, feel like it's been diffused a little bit. I don't know whether Kubo is the answer, but it is an answer. We've talked to people in the ecosystem that have other options that they're doing, as well as, you know, of course, companies like Google and which Kubernetes came out of and Microsoft, who's embracing Kubernetes. They like choice. They want people to use their platform, keeping a more open approach for Cloud Foundry to work with other pieces of open source in the ecosystem. Is goodness, time will tell whether, you know, this one solution makes sense. What's your take on that? Sure, I think Cloud Foundry has always been known as the opinionated platform. But I think now the subtleties come out that, yes, there are certain opinions in the way things are glued together. But as James Waters pointed out, they've always had different kinds of abstractions of things running on or in the platform in terms of whole apps or serverless that we didn't really talk about today. But so Kubernetes sitting beside there for people who want more knobs, who already have an app that expects that kind of scalability and management makes sense for the Cloud Foundry. I think they seem pretty open to embracing whatever works and in some ways it's an analogy to what's going on in Clouds like Azure and Google Cloud Platform in that it's like, look, bring us your workloads, we will run them. So I think that's kind of an opening of at least a publicly stance of an opening. Yeah, I like this. As Steve O'Grady said in the conversation we had with him, there's a lot of choices out there and therefore customers really, they want that. Of course there's the paradox of choice and how do I keep up on all the latest and greatest. I mean a couple of years, three years ago the last time I came to the show it was like, oh wait, Docker, I'm totally going to disrupt this. Now it's Kubernetes. We only brought up functions as a service or serverless like once and it did not seem to fit into where this plays today. But there's options out there, customers that are here like what they're doing, it is moving them forward, it is enabling them to be that faster, faster, faster, more agile, meet the needs of the business and stay competitive. Yeah, I mean Steve's term was different tools for different jobs or something like that, right? Yeah, so we always said Wikibon, it's horses for courses. Yeah, I mean Polyglot is one way that Coop Cloud Foundry World used to talk about it, but I think different tools is a great way. There is, we're in a technical time of great diversity, which is awesome, right? There's no monoculture here, which is super interesting, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Also the move from Cloud Foundry really started out as predominantly an on-premises deployment and public cloud is seeping into it. We talked to a couple of customers that are starting to use public cloud and most of them that weren't using it today were understanding where it fits, sorting that piece out and look at solutions like Cloud Foundry as one of those pieces that are giving them flexibility moving forward. Yeah, I mean I think this is something that's going to have to develop over time, right? You can, it's one thing to say, I'm a layer on top of another cloud, but Amazon really wants you to use its databases and Google Cloud really wants you to use its services. And so you can only stay completely independent for so long without taking advantage of those things as you evolve these platforms. So there is that tension there that will play out, but it's played out over and over again at many levels in tech. So we'll see some standard stuff there. If Cloud Foundry has enough value, people will use it as their deployment platform on multi-cloud, but I think sometimes even, well let's talk about multi-cloud, what you think Stu, but sometimes maybe multi-cloud is more of an ideal than a practicality for many organizations. Yeah, what about Pivotal? So if we look at Pivotal, number they're doing in Cloud Foundry was, last year about 275 million, a number that had been shared in one of the earnings calls, seems like very well positioned for the Fortune 1000. I'm always trying to figure out what is the time that they can go after? Who does it work for, who doesn't it? At OpenStack we talked about, well, great the telco, NFV market looks great, but is that 20 or 50 companies for something like Cloud Foundry? There's lots of big revenue that they can get by knocking down many of these Fortune 1000s, but it does seem to be that enterprise grade, therefore there's dollars attached to that. It is something that Pivotal has done a solid job of converting that need using Open Source into actual software revenue. Yes, their services and labs are a critical, critical piece of what they do, but it is the subscription of software that they've built. Many of their clients, I know, were on a three year subscription and lots of those renewals have started coming now. Expectation is that we could see an IPO by them by 2018. It's been reported, I'm sure Michael Dell would love to have another influx of cash that he could help fund all the things he's doing. What's your take on Pivotal coming out of this? I mean, from here it looks like Pivotal is very comfortable with its place and who its customers are. I didn't see a lot of hedging about we're going after a different market or we're going for the individual developer or we think this could be used by almost anybody. These are big companies we're talking about. In the keynote this morning for the foundation talked about enterprise grade, right? Talking about security, talking about scale, talking about developer experience. They're not shy about it. This is, they're serious when they say an enterprise grade platform, so which I think is great, right? You should know yourself and I really feel like both the foundation and Pivotal, a big part of the foundation, doesn't know itself and knows who its customers are. Yeah, I guess the only thing I look at is so many conferences I go to. Is this a platform that SaaS companies are building on? As we look at what the future of companies and especially in the technology space are going to look like, yes we have some of these big companies that are using it, but there's not the, oh okay, Workday and Salesforce and all these companies. I haven't seen these companies that are already just software companies using it. It's the industry older companies that are trying to get more into software and therefore this helps with their digital transformation. The companies that are born in the cloud, I haven't seen that in there and that's fine. There's definitely a diversity of the marketplace. Yeah, I mean if you look at the spectrum, we're saying that all soft companies are software companies, well those SaaS companies may be even more software company than a manufacturer or a finance company. So I think that's okay. One thing they've got to watch right with the ecosystem and the customer base is the speed of evolution, the speed of the ecosystem, new entrants coming in, can they keep the velocity of innovation up? I'm sure that's one thing they're looking at. It's interesting, right? Will the millennials be using Cloud Foundry caring about it or is this more the boomer, the older generation that have used it? Hey, it's not a Java versus Steve Grady said it's not a Java versus .NET or Microsoft World anymore but there's still a lot of Java developers and new ones coming in. I think, hey, there's still COBOL programmers. All right, I want to give you final takeaways. For me, I mean, some good quality users talking about their stories, there's reality here. As you said, there wasn't like any big shift as to what Cloud Foundry or the Foundation or what they're doing. There's not some big pivot that they need to do. No pun on Pivotal, but sometimes you go and you're like, are they tone deaf? Are they drinking their own Kool-Aid? I think this group understands where they fit. They're focused on delivering it. Definitely a changing ecosystem from previous years and how they fit into that whole Cloud environment. Give you the final word. Sure, I mean, I'd echo some of what you said. The people seem here, seem very productive, they seem happy, they seem super engaged. The show floor, when the sessions were in session, there was nobody here on the show floor. People are here to learn, which means that they're here to get stuff done. It's kind of a no-nonsense crowd. So I really enjoyed the day. All right, well, John, always a pleasure to catch up with you, appreciate you sitting in for the day and talking about all of this. You brought some great expertise to the discussion. One big thanks to the team here. We actually had four shows this week from theCUBE, so as we get towards almost July 4th, which means we get a deep breath before the fall tour comes, so I want to thank everybody for watching. As always, check out theCUBE.net for all the videos from this show and all the other shows. If you see a show that we're going to be at and you want to be on, get in touch with us, if you have a show that we're not at, please feel free to reach out to us. We're really easy to get in touch with. For my co-host, John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Once again, as always, thank you for watching theCUBE and we will see you at the next show.